We checked into this "5-star" hotel as a group of more than 30 from mostly Canada and the US. My wife and I were the first in line at the front desk and gave them our passports for registering and copying to send to government office. The clerk kept piling passports from people behind us on our passports and she kept taking the passport on top for processing and copying so that our passports stayed at the bottom un-processed. I kept telling the clerk doing the processing and copying in Mandarin that this was not right and we should not be kept waiting. I was only 6 feet away and the clerk just ignored me. In the mean time there was constant interruption from guests who checked in earlier demanding for room change because the air conditioning in their room was "not working". So some of the staff had to be diverted to re-process these guests. ( We later found out that by city ordinance hotels in Beijing were not allowed to turn on air conditioning until around mid May. I suppose the front desk staff kept switching rooms for these guests because they did not want us to know that our rooms would also be hot.) I asked to see the manager for the front desk but she pretended to be very busy and ignored me as well. We finally got processed and checked into our room after more than half an hour. Needless to say the room was very hot. A call to the front desk resulted in a "technician" visit. The tecnician informed us that the air condition control was "probably" not operational and told us to crank open the vent under the window. As expected this did not work and after several more calls somebody finally told us about the city energy-saving ordinance. So we had no choice but to suffer with the rest of the guests.

On a separate day we went down to the lobby with some friends preparing to go out to do some shopping. My wife asked the front desk in English for a city map and got one. Since I was going with some other friends to a different area to shop I went to the same desk and asked for a map as well in Mandarin but was told that there were no more maps. After a while another friend went up and asked for the same map in English and promptly got one from the same female clerk that told me all maps were given out. I was quite incensed and complained to a manager, brought him to the female clerk involved and told them off in both Mandarin and English. The manager apologised and quickly found his "personal" map and gave it to me. I was later told by many people, including tour guides, that this is quite common. Most Chinese, at least those in the service industry, still kow-tow to "foreigners" and unless they get shouted at they have a tendency to ignore or give poor service to their own countrymen. This is sad and unacceptable. I spoke to these people in Mandarin out of respect for them and also because I was proud to be back on Chinese soil, having lived in North America for over 40 years.

On a slightly different note, even taking out the service component, Hungkun International was barely a 3-star hotel in my view. There were no doormen most of the time and the facility was also inadequately maintained, with sub-standard patch-up repairs in the bathrooms and common areas. The carpet in our room was unbearably filthy with hair balls abundant. The previous guest's fruit snack remnants were still sitting on the night table. I asked for a re-vacuum and got a quick 2-minute job that picked up at best 30% of the visible.dirt. The cleaning maid clearly thought I was too fussy and could not understand why I directed her to do the vacuumng and clean up.The breakfast service was also very inadequate and was not equiped to handle all the quests appropriately and effeciently.

I left my comments on the form provided with the front desk manager and have not heard any acknowledgement so far.

I strongly recommend potential hotel seekers to stay AWAY from this hotel which has no ideas on how to run a hotel business.